On a variety of devices, the available processing power can be extremely limited, and can dramatically vary over time. For example, an application executing on a portable computer such as an iPad, is only provided limited processor power as the operating system and other applications tend to monopolize. The application here has no control over prioritizing the efforts of the processor, and thus may run into untenable data processing spikes, where the queued up data from the application can simply not accomplish the requested workload in the necessary timeframe.
The data processing latency problems are only exacerbated when the application is executing on a remote server and streaming the data packets to the client device. In such cases, network latency and data processing latency both contribute to the inability of the client to perform the desired workload.